Josh Frydenberg (Kooyong, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

The member for McMahon has some hide. The member for McMahon has brought this MPI into the chamber, completely in denial of the voters of Australia at the last election. The voters of Australia gave us the most emphatic mandate in 100 years. Labor's primary vote was the lowest since 1903. And do you know why? Because voters saw a bad government that had no idea how to manage the Australian economy.

Despite 600 promises that they were going to deliver a budget surplus, those opposite gave us world-record budget deficits—climbing mountains of debt equivalent to $667 billion over the coming decade, $123 billion of cumulative deficits and, what is worse, an interest bill of more than $12 billion a year, or $1 billion a month. You would think that, when you are handing out that amount of money, you would become popular. But in fact the contrary happened. The Australian people woke up to the reality that every man, woman and child in Australia today had been saddled with $13½ thousand of debt which, in the next 10 years, will climb to a record $24½ thousand. That is the legacy of the Labor Party.

When the IMF looked at the spending commitments that the Labor Party left us, it found that they were the highest among 17 advanced economies of the world. Our spending commitments were higher than Korea and China, more than Japan, the United States and Canada or France and Germany. That was your legacy.

So we made one fundamental promise to the Australian people, and that fundamental promise was that we would bring the budget back into balance and we would move it into surplus over time. In Joe Hockey's budget last night, he did exactly that. There were two major themes in the budget last night. The first was to start to pay back Labor's debt. Over the next 10 years, we will pay back $300 billion of Labor's debt and we will, as a result, save $16 billion in interest payments alone. That is an incredible start on the major job ahead of us. The second key theme in the budget last night was the structural reform that will lay the foundation for the future growth and prosperity of the Australian economy.

First is infrastructure. A record $50 billion is being invested in transport infrastructure; and, when you add that to the contribution of the states and the private sector, that is $125 billion. There are major road projects in every state, including the WestConnex project in New South Wales and the East West Link in my own state of Victoria. This is a massive commitment to get people into work and to make Australians' lives that much easier.

A second component of our growth strategy is to build education and innovation for the future. A medical research future fund worth $20 billion, without parallel around the world, will be the pride of the Australian educational and medical sectors. Deregulating uni fees, which the member for Fraser completely agrees with, will have a huge impact on lifting excellence in our university sector. Those who are on apprenticeships, those who are in TAFE and those who are getting sub-bachelor degrees will also get assistance, for the very first time, from this Commonwealth.

The third element of our growth agenda is to boost participation—helping aged Australians get back into the workforce with incentives for employers, helping mothers to stay in the workforce with the Paid Parental Leave scheme, helping young people move off the DSP or other welfare payments and into employment.

That is what we are on about, and it all comes back to our fundamental values of free enterprise, support for the individual and a smaller role for the state. That is what the Australian people elected us to do at the last election, that is why it is a fundamentally honest budget that the Treasurer has delivered and that is why we will continue to win the confidence of the Australian people.

See this speech in context